This summer’s exhibition at Penlee House, Penzance was devoted to the paintings of Harold Harvey, the only Cornish born artist associated with the Newlyn circle of painters led by Stanhope Forbes and Laura and Harold Knight. Harvey was an accomplished constructor of convincing figure compositions, ever alert to the awkwardness, discomfort or tension in the individuals portrayed. Small social gatherings and domestic scenes were minutely observed and described in detail with particular attention to choices of clothing and facial expressions. Furnishings and decorative accessories in the home came under similar scrutiny. The work of the intensively observed fishing fleet held little interest and he saw the world of the countryside through the lens of manual labour. Most Newlyn painters ignored the industrial aspect of Cornish life, unwilling to confront the violence done to the local landscape by the activities of extractive industry, notably the excavation of China Clay and the mining of tin and copper. Distractions of the modern world of popular entertainment and the transport revolution were studiously avoided by almost all local artists but Harvey kept returning to these subjects throughout his career. Several of his finest paintings - featuring sunbathers and swimmers, girls outside the cinema, travellers on the top deck of a bus - were a product of this fascination.
His figure drawing was uneven in quality, lacking the bravura of Laura Knight or the conviction of Stanhope Forbes, flabbiness kept creeping in. In the 1930s, under the influence of contemporary trends (Stanley Spencer?), he cautiously experimented with figure distortion and elongation to especially good effect in the bathers painting (August 1939). Two conflicting tendencies can be seen in his use of colour where a preference for clear, vibrant hues applied with firm, controlled brushwork existed alongside a drift into more pastel hues and softer, Renoir-influenced application of paint. The latter technique being more apparent in portraiture, especially of child subjects. The key element in his subject choices is his local origin - incomers and outsiders fell heavily for the most picturesque features of Cornish life (fishing, farming and a ravishing coastline in dazzling sunshine). For Harvey these aspects were taken for granted and he rarely turned to them. His eyes were focused on a localised experience of everyday life - the domestic middle class interior, the world of work and manual labour, the arrival of mass tourism. Inside the home he was an acute observer of the enigmatic gesture, the unusual body posture and the ambivalent glance, sometimes hinting at an underlying disquiet or noting the vagaries of fashion and the faintly absurd. Friends and acquaintances described him as affable and good natured, though somewhat taciturn. In later life he converted to Catholicism but nothing of his spiritual life made its way into his work which remained resolutely materialist.
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